


counterpoint

by sunsmasher



Category: Fables - Willingham, The Wolf Among Us
Genre: F/M, Getting Together, Smoking, Vomiting, but was written for games canon, contains references to comics canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 14:04:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5208590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere at this party, Snow’s taken a bite of her hors-d'oeuvres. Bigby can’t see her through the press of people, or hear anything distinct at all, but he can smell her. He can smell all of her, every flyaway hair on her head, every lost drop of wine on her dress. She’s like a beacon in the room, in any room, on any day, a high beam headlight in silk and satin, and the point at which she stands is the roving center of Bigby’s world.</p><p>He closes his eyes against it. He wants a cigarette.</p>
            </blockquote>





	counterpoint

Four weeks after the Crooked Man meets his end, Good King Cole comes home.

“—? 1950?” Cinderella is saying, into Bigby’s ear. The noise of the party in King Cole’s spacious penthouse is thunderous, too loud for even Bigby to have heard the first half of her question, but it’s the same question she asks him at every welcome home party and Remembrance Day Ball. _When’s the last time you bought a new suit, Bigby?_

“August, 1945, he says, staring mechanically out over the crowds. “Same as the last time we made small talk at a party.”

She laughs as if he’s told a joke. Her next comment, probably about his haircut, he doesn’t make note of. Somewhere, Snow’s taken a bite of her hors-d'oeuvres. He can’t see her through the press, or hear anything distinct at all, but he can smell her. He can smell all of her, every flyaway hair on her head, every lost drop of wine on her dress. She’s like a beacon in the room, in any room, on any day, a high beam headlight in silk and satin, and the point at which she stands is the roving center of Bigby’s world.

He closes his eyes against it. He wants a cigarette.

His pants, when he pats them down, are empty. It’s a travesty, and Cinderella’s timely disappearance probably makes it a betrayal, too. She had been pressed up against him pretty close, now that he thinks about it, but it hadn’t registered at the time. It hardly registers now. Fifty feet away, Snow has just brushed her hair behind her ear. The lilac note of her shampoo is all consuming.

Someone presses a plate into his hands, and a too-large fraction of the crowd has started singing. His neighbor raises his voice in a booming toast, and Bigby takes a bite of whatever’s on his plate when a fleet of champagne glasses are raised to the ceiling. Snow’s voice rings like a bell in his ears, and her smell wreathes his head in flame. She’s close, almost near enough to see through the crowds, and Bigby doesn’t taste his food until it’s halfway down his throat.

And then he does. And then he says, “ _Shit.”_

 

* * *

 

“Oh, come on, Snow, he won’t get mad if they’re coming from you,” Cinderella says, winningly, as she puts a hand to the small of Snow's back and shoves.

"Cindy, what—" Snow starts, hustling not to trip over the hem of her gown as she tumbles into the elevator. Her protest goes unfinished. The doors are already closing when she turns, and Cinderella, waving cheerfully in front of the last dregs of the party, slides from view. Snow inhales, and then swears like she only does when no one's around to hear.

It doesn’t make her feel any better.

She sighs, and leans back against the handrail, staring down at the pack of battered cigarettes Cindy pressed into her hand in the penthouse. They're Bigby's, obviously. Even if Cindy hadn't explained who she'd filched them from, Snow would know. The pack is cheap and grimy, a bit of dried brown blood on one corner, and of brand she's only ever seen dock workers and law enforcement smoke. Plus, they smell like him.

Snow groans, and thumps her head against the elevator's cheap paneling. What is she _doing_.

She's still tossing the cigarette pack from hand to hand, careful of its contents, when the door opens for Bigby's floor. She feels like she's marching off to war again, but the metaphor collapses as soon as she tries to place who she's fighting and why. Her mind shrinks from it. She’s no officer or swordsman, just a woman in a long silk dress standing in front of Bigby's door, tattered cigarettes held in a careful grip, breath spiked with anxiety.

In the long list of stupid things she's done this summer, the way her hand hovers over Bigby's door before she knocks has got to be the stupidest.

But she does knock, and, to her surprise, the door swings open at her touch. A line forms between her brows.

"Bigby?" she calls through the doorway, a different kind of anxiety starting to catch between her teeth. The apartment is a mess, papers everywhere and blood on the furniture, though that's not unusual enough to be a real warning sign.

"Bigby!" she tries again, cigarettes denting in her hand as she steps over the threshold. This time, a groan from the bathroom answers her, and Snow dashes forwards. Bigby is curled on his bathroom floor when she sees him, head propped against the toilet bowl, and he opens one eye when she puts a hand to the doorframe.

"Snow," he says, voice rough.

His expression is groggy. Heedless of the state of his floor, he’s still in his old, outmoded suit, and the overabundance of fabric seems to swallow him up like a wave.

"Are you drunk?" she asks, a little incredulous. Her anxiety is already giving way, in the face of Bigby's apparent safety. To what, she’s not sure, but she can feel it set her mouth in a flat line and cross her arms before of her chest. “I didn’t even know you could.”

"Can," he replies, rubbing a hand over his mouth. His throat works as he swallows. "If I try. Not drunk, though."

"Then what—"

In a sudden, graceless movement, Bigby lurches around and vomits into the toilet bowl. The retching lasts for a long time, long enough to make Snow’s back start to itch with awkwardness, but she can’t exactly leave. The apartment’s too small to hide from the wet, gasping noise of it, for one thing, and if she goes out in the corridor she’s not sure she’ll be able to make it through the front door again.

After a while, Bigby drops his head down against his forearm and breathes heavily.

"You can't have the flu," Snow says. It sounds like a question, though she hadn’t meant it to. Bigby shakes his head wordlessly, dragging at the fabric of his sleeves. One hand flexes mindlessly over his stomach. He doesn’t offer further reply.

Snow runs a hand through her hair, pressing hard against the scalp. The light in the bathroom is weak, shining grey and watery from the last remaining bulb, and it does little for Bigby’s complexion. Or her own, when she meets her own eye in the cabinet mirror. She looks sick, like him, and scared. Also like him. If that’s what that glimpse of feeling had been, anyways, when he’d caught sight of her in the door.  

The apartment is too quiet for her to sigh like she wants to. She can’t ignore that this is untenable, no matter how hard she tries. Not their silence, nor her position in the doorway, nor the entirety of this thing they’ve been doing the past four weeks.

That she’s been doing, if she has to get specific about it.

That she’s been doing to him, to be precise.

She clenches her jaw. She’s been alive for a very long time, by the reckoning of fables. She’ll be delighted to grow out of lying to herself any day now.

Bigby watches her with one eye, half his face still buried in his sleeve. She’s conscious of that eye on her as she steps over his splayed legs and seats herself on the side of the bathtub. It’s a familiar sensation.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, once she’s settled, his cigarettes nearly forgotten in her lap. The lip of the tub is narrow, and she has to sit with feet a bit apart, propping her elbows on her knees to keep her balance. It puts her close to him. The fingers of one hand nearly brush his suit coat when he shifts.

The sick sheen to his face is impossible to ignore, this close. “Hobbes handed me cake during the toast. Betting Bluebeard spiked my food,” he says.

Anxiety surges up her throat, because there are so very many nasty things Bluebeard could get a hold of if he tried, if he didn’t mind sending Hobbes out to the mundys, if he really meant to hurt someone, and after that fight she interrupted in the basement cell he could certainly be interested in hurting the man who’d had his hand around his throat—

Bigby is very good at reading her, or else she’s just very easy to read. He raises one hand, shaky but sure, to settle over her own. She pauses in her wringing. His thumb rubs over her knuckles.

“It’s fine, Snow,” he says, nearly managing a smile. “It’s just chocolate.”

She snorts, and promptly slaps a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. At that, Bigby does grin.

“No, you can laugh,” he says. “It’s pretty funny.”

“Chocolate?” she squeaks.

“Yup.”

Despite the way he’s draped over a toilet bowl and sweating like a pig, his half a chuckle sounds genuine.

Snow’s hand is still covering her mouth, hiding her smile. “Oh, and you really hate the dog jokes, too.”

“Dog jokes plural?”

“I’m sure you don’t want me to rattle them all off.”

This is the first time they’ve been alone together since that night in the kitchen, after the fight with Mary.

“You don’t know that,” he says. “Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment.”

“Maybe,” she says, and turns her hands in her lap. They close over his shaky palm. He doesn’t watch her sharply, like she might expect, just attentively. His head settles a bit more against his arm.

“They’re not very funny anyways,” she adds.

“No,” he replies. “Maybe I’d like them more, if they were.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, probably not.”

The last remaining light in the bathroom is, if not strong, then steady. The traffic noise from Bullfinch street lulls. Bigby seems to content to watch her in silence, though he closes his eyes after a moment, maybe thinking she’d prefer it that way, and Snow’s teeth begin to work at the inside of her lip. She knows what’s supposed to happen next, she does, but avoidance is like a deep black ditch she can’t climb out of. She can only drag herself along the bottom and hope it will someday end.

“So how’d he get you with chocolate anyways, with that nose of yours?” she asks, resigned to her own denial.

Her tone is light, but Bigby suddenly stills. His hand withdraws from hers, slowly, by inches, and he opens his eyes with reluctance. His face is flat and deeply-carved.

“Are you—“ she starts, feeling her own expression settle into soft confusion, but Bigby hunches up again, mouth twisting, and turns to vomit into the toilet. It doesn't last very long, if only because there seems to be nothing left in his stomach. After a few wrenching heaves, back curved sharply, he sits back on his heels. He doesn't return to face her, though.

She wants to speak, but Bigby's knuckles are going white at the edge of the toilet bowl.

"I wanted to tell you at a better time," he says.

Snow finds she's picking at the corner of Bigby's cigarettes. Tell her what?

"Tell me what?"

"...When there wasn't any other shit to deal with, maybe." Did he hear her?

"Bigby, tell me _what_?"

His eyes snap up to hers, like he'd forgotten she was there, or was just hoping it wasn't true. A lock of hair curls over his forehead, and her fingers itch to brush it back. She keeps them knotted.

"But I’m starting to think there’s always gonna be more shit," he says to her. "Snow, I couldn't taste the chocolate in the cake because all I could smell was you."

Snow colors, back straightening. "What? Me?" she asks, voice tight. "Like... like my perfume, you mean? My deodorant?"

He shakes his head. He must be sweltering in that suit.

“Not what you were wearing, _you_. Your deodorant and shit, that’s part of it, but it’s not…”

He trails off, scrubbing at his face with one hand like he can’t figure out the words. Snow attempts to understand.

“So you… smelled me, but— Bigby, what difference does that make? How could you not realize what you were eating? I was halfway across the room from you when the cake was being passed around!”

“It doesn’t matter how far away you are,” he grits out. “I can always smell you. Pretty much always. I think my range is about a hundred miles. It gets fuzzy, farther than that.”

“A hundred—“ she chokes, “What are you _talking_ about? You can smell me when I’m in _Philly_?”

He looks miserable. “Yes,” he says. “If the wind’s right.” The packet of cigarettes is buckling in her grip.

“So you know where I am. All of the time.”

“Yes.”

“What else do you know.”

His thousand yard stare finally cracks, glassy eyes flickering up to hers. The misery is drawn into his skin, and it’s starting to infuriate her.

He looks like he’s going to protest, and she snarls. “ _Tell me_.”

His heavy-eyed stare lasts a bare moment longer. “You had white wine at the party, and champagne during the toast. The new soap you’re using is drying out your skin. Your blood sugar is low.”

“ _And?_ ” she demands, dares him.

“…And your period started yesterday,” he says, eyes on her. He looks like he’s preparing himself for an onslaught. She provides.

“Bigby, what the _fuck_?”

She hasn’t sworn at him since the ‘30s. He winces painfully.

“I’m sorry, Snow,” he says, and he sounds it, god damn him. “I should have told you a long time ago. When you made me human. Before, probably.”

Snow stands, or maybe she’s already been standing. She feels like she’s trapped in the great brass hollow of a bell. Everything is ringing.

“It’s _always_ been like this? And this is… this is specifically a me thing, isn’t it? Or you’d be smelling when every woman in Fabletown was on her—“

High, white fury leaves her momentarily wordless, but she rallies.

“Only I smell like this to you.”

“Yes.”

The exhaustion, and the reaction to the chocolate, has wiped him of all excess emotion. She can’t focus enough through her own screaming rage to read his flat face.

“ _Why?_ ”

“Snow, I—“ So she was wrong after all. A blind man couldn’t miss the wretched twist to his mouth, staring up at her from his crumpled heap on the tiles. “Don’t make me say it. Please.”

“God _damn_ you, Bigby,” she spits, lips curled back from her teeth, and looks away.

She can see it from the corner of her eye when he shifts, like he might try and stand and face her, or god help him _comfort_ her, and she will not be here for this. She will not stand in this dingy little bathroom in this dingy little apartment and let him touch her.

“Snow,” he tries, when she nearly leaps over his legs in her haste for the door, but she ignores him.

It’s four quick strides to get to the hallway, another ten to the elevators, and twenty seconds of waiting for a door to open, envisioning the exact force and heft with which she will smack him if he tries to follow her, before she decides to take the stairs.

Five breathless flights later, she’s in the front garden. His cigarettes are still in her hand. She throws them against a tree, and then, because that was richly satisfying, she begins snatching the ornamental rocks from the border of the path and chucking them at the wall. They hit with echoing _cracks_ , and she throws them until her scooping fingers find only dirt. How dare he, says the pile of rocks at the base of the wall. How dare he, says the dirt and the grass and the heaving bellows of her lungs.

She paces, then stops, then sits on the front steps of the Woodland and twists a lock of hair between her fingers. It’s nearly 2am by now, the air still overwarm and muggy despite the hour. _August is bullshit_ , she thinks, taking a small, petty pleasure in the curse. She wants a cigarette.

The desire is instant and overwhelming. She wants a cigarette. And maybe a drink, and certainly to never have met Bigby Wolf, no matter the number of times he’s saved her pretty skin. If she’d died six hundred years ago she wouldn’t be so angry _now_.

A drink is out of her immediate grasp, as is time travel, but cigarettes aren’t. She stands and returns to the tree, shaking the grass off one of Bigby’s coffin nails as she fishes it from among the roots. It smells awful before she’s even got it lit, but her own, infrequently used pack of Virginia Slims is languishing in her underwear drawer, and god forbid she go ask Grimble for a smoke after the snarl he got when he came to investigate the noise. Needs must, as it were. And fuck him, anyways.

Lighting the damn thing proves a momentary challenge, but then she finds Grimble's secret stash behind the loose brick in the garden wall and fishes out a half-empty matchbook. Grimble's cigars are there, too, and quite nice ones by the look of them, but she's become perversely dedicated to her coffin nail. The first inhale is as disgusting as she'd expected, which brings its own pleasure, and she coughs like a mundy teenager. The second inhale is tolerable, and the third gratifying. By the fourth, she's drifted back towards the steps. She sits, legs stretched out and one elbow cupped in her palm, and she thinks.

Bigby Wolf has been in love with her since the moment they met. Considering the _way_ they met, this is almost flattering. By the time he'd sprung her and Rose from the Adversary's chain gang, it’d been a long few weeks since they'd last seen a bath.

That he loves her, and that he's loved her at length, isn’t something she’s… unaware of. It hasn’t been for some time, despite her dedication to denying it. And her recent trend of acknowledging it only when she hasn't got anything else on her plate.

They'd danced, once, at some Welcome Home ball or another. Probably in the ‘20s, from what she remembers of her dress, and probably in Prince Charming's honor, from what she remembers of her emotional state. Bigby had found her out on a balcony, tearing a napkin to shreds, and he hadn't asked her if she was alright, for which she would have flipped him over the handrail. Instead he'd handed her another napkin and started talking. He'd told her, in his ever-exhausted way, of Colin the pig getting his head stuck between the bars of a fence while rooting for garbage, and how every mundy who'd passed them by that afternoon, Colin doing his best not to swear as Bigby tugged at his ass and Bigby cursing enough for the both of them, had politely informed Bigby that he'd surely have a much easier time getting the pig free if he hit it over the head with a brick first, or, on the advice of the neighborhood butcher out for a smoke, slit the silly thing's throat.

Bigby had smiled, recalling Colin's enraged shriek. Snow had laughed. She'd laughed brightly, too, despite the skulking knowledge that Charming and her sister weren't two rooms away, batting their eyelashes and flirting like mad. When the music changed and he'd asked her to dance, she'd agreed readily. When the music had changed again, and then a third time, they’d still been moving hand in hand across the parquet.

Around the point she'd begun to notice her own breathlessness, Snow had looked at Bigby, his toothy smile, and thought _he loves me_. The notion had been clear as a song.

Sitting with her long legs crossed in the humid August night, Snow thinks there might have been another thought that came, after that first revelation. Something like, _he's kind, despite himself_ or _Charming never listened so well_ but the exact words of it are muddy. She'd buried it, she thinks now, because she's a coward and a sneak, as much as any of them who lived to escape the Homelands. She'd ignored her own answering counterpoint and kept ignoring it for sixty-odd years, and thought they could live like that.

And he'd thought he could sniff out her menstrual cycle every month for six hundred years without so much as dropping her a line, and that they could live like that, too.

Righteous, rasping anger tries to claw its way out her skin again, but Snow stays seated. She takes another drag of Bigby's cigarette, picking at a fleck of dry skin on her elbow. She lets the anger happen.

It comes in strength, leaving her flushed and close to shaking, shamed by the violation, furious at the secret, but as the lit end of the cigarette nears her fingers, it begins to ebb. She can maintain a grudge with the best of them, but not this. Not these heights. She feels exhausted by them. Half of her can never forgive him, will never forgive him, but another part of her, the part that hasn't been a princess for a couple hundred years now and stepped in some dogshit on the way to the subway yesterday morning, that part wonders what never forgiving Bigby would look like.

Lonely, probably. Very lonely.

The cigarette finally reaches her fingertips, and she flicks it down the paving stones without much thought. It glows for a moment like a grounded lightning bug, then fizzles out, leaving nothing but a shadow. And the smell. The smell somehow lingers, despite the gentle breeze, and Snow smiles thinly at its fortitude. She's always been amazed by the longevity of that burnt-tar stench, and more than one of her shirt has been absolutely ruined by it. It's as familiar as her own perfume by this point— more familiar, really. Her perfumes might as well be expensive airborne tap water, for all that anyone can smell them when Bigby's around, sulking and grouching and smoking. Which is his resting state, of course. He smokes like nicotine personally did him wrong.

Snow blinks, hands stilling in her lap.

Bigby smokes like a damned chimney.

She stands up.

 

* * *

 

Bigby is in about the same place she left him when she returns to the apartment. He looks like he may have tried to sleep on the floor for a while, a rolled-up towel lying about where his head would be, but he’s propped up on his elbows when she takes up her place in the doorway. Smelled her coming, of course.

“Snow,” he says, voice hoarse, though that’s about as far as he gets. She lets him flounder for a while, trying to find the words to whatever recompense he’s thinking he’ll pay, but he’s still visibly half-dead with exhaustion and sick. She takes pity.

“You haven’t been sleeping on that mattress pad on the floor in the corner, have you?” she asks, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the “furniture” in question. It’s in the spot where his armchair used to be. Bigby’s looking profoundly reminiscent of a deer in the headlights.

“Yeah?” he manages, no doubt struggling with the fact that Snow isn’t yelling at him. Honestly she’s wondering about it too, if in a more detached way. “I couldn’t get all the blood out of the chair after the fight in the alley, and it smelled, so I tossed it.”

“And you’ve been sleeping on the floor ever since?”

“Well, I’ve got a pillow,” he offers, not in his own defense, but like this a real luxury to be taken into account. For the sake of full disclosure.

Snow finds herself smiling, just a little. More a tilt to her lips than anything. She can see Bigby’s confusion triple.

“When was the last time you owned a real bed?”

Now he just looks plain cornered. He scoots until he’s backed against the side of the tub, near the spot where she’d sat.

“A few years ago? Early ‘70s, maybe?”

“Bigby,” she says patiently, “It’s 1986.”

The notion appears to be too much for him.

“Snow...” he tries, one hand making fists in the fabric of his pants, and she realizes this is a kind of cruelty, too. He’s tired, she’s tired, and it’s been a long century. She can’t keep speaking in circles.

“C’mere,” she says, and extends a hand. He looks between her palm and her face in open worry, still waiting for her anger, but apparently submitting all the same. He clasps his palm to hers after only a moment, she gets her other hand under his elbow, and with a wrench, he’s up.

Mostly up. He staggers a bit, listing slightly leftwards, but a hand on his chest steers him back to center.

“You were waiting for a good time to tell me about all this,” she begins, slinging his arm over her shoulders and walking them towards the front door, “But that was never how it was going to work.”

She closes the door behind them when they get to the hallway, and almost asks about locking it, but Bigby appears unconcerned. He’s watching her intently, like the next era of his long life will be born from her judgment. It’s not as unnerving as she’d expected.

“It’s a violation of my privacy,” she explains, while they wait for the elevator. “A very deep and prolonged one, at that. It was always going to be upsetting, whenever you told me. It still is.”

Bigby shifts his weight, like he expects her to dump him for dead in the fifth floor elevator lobby, but she keeps her grip on his arm. Her other hand curves around his ribs.

“You... are upset, then?” he says. The question is hesitant, like he thinks he already should know the answer.

They ease into the elevator when the doors open. “Yes,” she replies, though she knows she hardly sounds it. “Maybe not as upset as I was an hour ago, but it's still there. It’ll take me a while to forgive you completely."

"Forgive—?" Bigby echoes, eyes going wide. They're across from each other now, his back against the wall. Her hand is still on his arm, somehow. His shock is palpable.

She nods, lips twisting in a smile. "Someone finally had to, right?"

He doesn't reply. His eyes haven't left her face.

"I was sitting out on the steps," she says, in explanation, "and I smoked one of your cigarettes. I still had them, and, right, I know, it was just awful. I couldn't imagine how you stood the taste of them, let alone the smell."

She glances down to her hand on his arm, thumb moving softly over the fabric, then back up to his face. It's unclear if he's still breathing.

"And I realized that was the point, wasn't it? The awful smell. You smoked them all the time so that you couldn't smell me. Or at least so that you could try not to."

They've been stopped on her floor for a while now. A wayward, sensible part of her hopes that no one else calls the elevator.

“It was like— you didn’t ask to have this connection to me, and looking back I know you haven’t taken advantage of it, or abused it, that you’ve tried your hardest to ignore it, and that the only reason you got dosed at the party was because you didn’t have your cigarettes to keep me out of your head and—”

She realizes she’s got a hand pressed to chest his now. His mouth is open, his breathing shaky. She feels possessed, like she has to convince him of something, like she has to get him to understand what she herself has just figured out.

“And I realized you try _so hard_ , Bigby. You try to be good, and respectful, and just, and I think you try all the time just to be human, and you screw up sometimes, god knows this whole night’s been a complete mess, but you try every day, anyways, and that matters to me. Despite the screw ups. It matters to me that you _still try_.”

He looks at her, and swallows.

“Fuck, Snow,” is all he manages, sounding stunned. He’s said her name in that tone a couple times tonight.

She grins, a little shaky herself. Something starts to shine in his expression.

“C’mon,” she finally says, tugging him out of the elevator. He follows like a large, hairy duckling, one arm looping around her shoulders.

She sort of props him against a wall while she fumbles for her keys, unceasingly aware of the quiet way he watches her. “All that being said, it is the secrecy that left me the angriest,” she says, fitting the key into the lock. “I know it wasn’t really intentional, but I don’t think we can keep things from each other. Especially now that we’re in charge of the whole community.”

He nods. The interior of her apartment is blessedly cool. “Right,” he says, a bit distantly. His color looks better, but her apartment’s higher in the building, and the light always has been nicer up here.

“So at some point in the next few years you should probably tell me how you’re funding all the undercover operations,” she adds shooting him a glance. He’s leaning back on her couch now, the trip upstairs still enough to knock him out even with his stomach problems gone. His face shifts at her comment, but not guiltily, she doesn’t think. Another secret he knew he couldn’t keep forever, then.

“In a few years,” he agrees, pushing his hair back from his forehead with one hand. “When we’re more used to this. But, Snow—”

She’s drifted closer to him, moving quietly in the calm blue softness of her apartment, and he takes one of her hands in his own. His palms are rough, like a batter’s. He stares at her openly.

“Snow, I know I’ve got no right to ask for anything after tonight, but please,” he says. She can hear in him the breathlessness that took her in the elevator. “Let it go two ways. I have to know.”

She nods. He’s already speaking.

“Snow, I— do you love me?”

She never thought it could be such an easy question.

“Yes,” she says, her smile like a blooming rose, “Of course.”

For a half-second there’s the beatific joy of watching a new world be born in his eyes, and then there’s only the blur of his suit as he pulls her down in an instant, wrapping her in his arms before she’s even touched the cushions, the rough warmth of his laugh loud in her ear as she folds her arms around him in turn. “You mean it,” he breathes, one hand messing her hair, cupping the back of her head. “I could tell. You really fucking mean it.”

“Smell it on me?” she asks, teasing, into the skin of his throat. His baggy old suit has got them both in its clutches now. She feels as if she’s been lying in the sun for hours and hours.

“No, no,” he whispers, sounding half-drunk on it. “I just knew. You’d never tell me a lie. Not about that.”

“Never,” she agrees, and pulls back just far enough to kiss him.

He’s still sick, of course. His lips are feverish, and his the skin of his jaw hot under her hands, and he still smells like those damn cigarettes. Or maybe it’s her. His mouth tastes like puke, and hers probably like tar. His lips skate over hers, always gentle with her when it’s important, and she’s so deliriously happy she could cry.

“Bigby,” she says, after breathless minutes, “Bigby, I’m so sorry. I really am.”

She’s too close to really see his expression, but the confusion in his voice is almost painful.

“For what?” he whispers, pressing his forehead to hers. Her face is cradled in his hands. “For what?”

“I’ve been in love with you since 1927 and never let myself know it,” she says. His thumbs wipe at the wet spots in the corners of her eyes. “If I’d just told you then, we could have been this happy for sixty years.”

“1927…?” He’s laughing again, and she couldn’t begin to ask why. “Hell, babe, I wouldn’t give up a minute of it if it meant not having you in my arms right this very second, getting my suit snotty.”

He grins, as wide as she’s ever seen him. Despite the chocolate poisoning and the fading remnants of a black eye and the general rough-and-tumble nature, it makes him look like a puppy. It makes him look young.

She kisses him again. It’s long, and sweet, and warm.

 

* * *

 

In her bed, as the sky starts to brighten, they lie face to face. Their noses nearly touch.

“You think we can do it?” she asks, voice hushed. “Run the town and be in love?”

Bigby’s breathing is so soft she’s surprised he responds.

“Well,” he says, slow and thoughtful, sleep in his voice, “Seems like we’ve been doing it for long enough already.”

It doesn’t happen every time, Snow thinks, but when he’s right, he’s right.

 

* * *

 

Bigby wakes many hours later with the certain knowledge that it wasn’t a dream. For one thing, it was too beautiful. For another, no dream girl’s ever made him gargle mouthwash before they got into bed.

It’s well into the afternoon, judging by the light in Snow’s bedroom (and fuck if that isn’t something, waking up among her sheets on her bed), though Snow’s doesn’t seem to be down in the Business Office working. The door’s closed, but he can smell she’s nearby. Like he always can. Which, well, at least she knows now.

Bigby pauses, covers half-drawn from his legs, and feels the sudden rumble of six hundred years of accrued guilt go rolling off his back. Snow knows now and she somehow didn’t kill him. She actually stuck her tongue down his throat, instead. The worst didn’t come to pass, it just sort of goosed him and waved him through.

 _Everything worked out_.

And despite Bigby’s immediate and instinctual distrust of anything good happening in this life, he can’t argue with the facts. He is standing in Snow’s bedroom in an undershirt and briefs. Early in the morning, he woke for a moment to feel her hand in his hair. Last night, she tasted like his cigarettes.

He contemplates the fact that, perhaps for the first time since Snow stabbed him with that lycanthropic knife and made him a man in the first place, it might be a damned good day to be Bigby Wolf.

“He emerges!” Snow calls in mock-surprise when he makes his way out of the bedroom. She’s sitting in the kitchen, eating salted nuts by the handful, and looks up from her stack of papers only when he pulls up the chair across from her. The second it’s free of peanuts, he grabs hold of the hand not holding a quarterly report and presses a kiss to her knuckles. In return, she blushes, smiles, and then smacks him lightly over the head with her accounting.

“You’re feeling better, I take it,” she says, a bit of color still painting her cheeks. Bigby grins.

“Much,” he replies. “Healing time like mine, I can’t wait to head down to the Security Office and start my day. Might even find my good buddy Bluebeard, if I hunt around a bit.”

Snow suddenly smiles, as spiteful as he’s ever seen her. “Actually, that might take more hunting than you’d really care for.”

“Oh?” She looks positively proud of herself.

“As it would _happen_ ,” Snow says, overacting with the best of them, “Buffkin is far more respectful of rank than any of us had expected. For instance, when I went down to the office this morning and demanded he bring me the blackmail material I _know_ Crane was hiding in the back rooms lest he feel the Deputy Mayor’s foot up his butt, he was really only too eager to comply.”

Bigby’s brows raise. His pity for Buffkin is completely, totally eclipsed by his fascination with the way Snow’s teeth flash between her lips when she smirks like this.

“What’d he have on us?” Bigby asks, if only to keep her talking. He plans to spend several days at this tiny kitchen table, trying to keep her talking.

“Haven’t looked into it yet,” Snow shrugs. “I’m not even sure he considered us real threats, the idiot. Bluebeard, however—” she waves a hand over the great dunes of papers covering her small table, “—he had a lot on Bluebeard.”

Bigby slides one sheet free of its home. It’s a mess of numbers and figures in faded ink, dense as dirt and completely unreadable to him. “Finances?” he tries.

“ _Oh_ , yes,” Snow says, sounding more excited about this than Bigby feels is really warranted. “God knows how he got it, but Crane had copies of IRS files—they’re the mundy tax people, Bigby—on not just one, but _three_ of Bluebeard’s fake identities.”

Bigby’s starting to feel a little out of his depth here. “Fake identities? Bluebeard was pretending to be three separate mundies for—?”

“For tax reasons, yes,” Snow says patiently, as if she believes that Bigby will somehow understand this given enough time, “Mostly to do with his mundy investments and our longevity problems. I had to get Pinocchio up here to help me sort all of it out—he’s always had a good head for money, but by lunch we’d worked out most of the big mundy finance laws Bluebeard’s broken in the past thirty years.”

Mundy laws have always seemed pretty ephemeral to Bigby, especially the ones to do with money. Their definitions are hardly consistent, and he’s still not sure why gold stopped being involved.

“So about a few hours ago,” Snow is saying, “I put a call in to Cindy’s friend at the IRS— still the tax people, Bigby— and they arrested Bluebeard this afternoon.”

Bigby squints. “The tax people arrested Bluebeard.”

“Mundies take their taxation very seriously, you know. They came with four FBI agents and the Secret Service and they broke his nose against a squad car.”

Right, this Bigby can get behind.

“The nose might have been my fault, actually,” Snow adds. “I came out front to watch the show, and I must have looked pleased with myself because Bluebeard made a grab for me as soon as he saw me, and the agents didn’t think that was very smart, and events sort of progressed from there.”

Bigby stands, letting his chair fall behind him with a clatter. Snow grins sunnily.

“Things go well for us, he’ll be gone for three years. Maybe a little more, for resisting arrest.”

“Snow,” Bigby growls, looming intently.

“Yes, dear,” she replies, tilting her head back and beaming.

“This is the hottest story you’ve ever told me.”

“Sure, but that’s not saying much, is it? I think I can do better next time.”

Bigby shakes his head minutely, leaning forward until he can plant a hand on the back of her chair. She giggles like a teenager as he tilts her back, balancing the thing on two legs. Her feet knock against his shins.

“Not necessary, thanks,” he says, their noses nearly brushing. Looking serious and intimidating is becoming increasingly difficult as Snow’s giggles start to bloom into full, high flowers of laughter. “Put on something nice, Ms. White. We’re going out to celebrate.”

“Oh, _are_ we,” Snow replies, steely-eyed and daring despite the way she has to bite her lip not to smile. “And where do you propose we go, Mr. Wolf?”

“That World’s Fair thing still going on?”

“Not since 1965, no.” She’s going to draw blood soon, she doesn’t let go of her smile.

“Show at the Hippodrome?”

“They tore it down in ‘39!”

He pulls her chair back upright, and she lets the momentum carry her onto two feet. Standing, they’re just about the same height. Her laughing eyes are even with his. If they don’t abandon the straight faces soon they’re almost definitely going to hurt themselves.

“The Crystal Palace?” he tries, trying for mournful. “Don’t tell me the Crystal Palace is gone, too.”

Her somber nod also fails with prejudice. “Burned to the ground in 1850-something. Very sad.”

“Damn,” he sighs, shaking his head. “ _Damn_. Well, Snow, you’ll just have to think of somewhere we can go and toast Bluebeard’s timely absence. Know any place nice that’s still standing?”

Every frustrated decade they spent in each other’s company is worth it for the way she’s grinning at him now.

“Not a single one. We’ll have to wing it.”

Her smile is infectious. Her smile could brighten worlds.

“Ah, well,” Bigby says, “I’m sure we’ll be alright.”

The light in Snow’s kitchen is heavy and gold, and he knows her lips, when they get around to that part of the afternoon, will taste remarkably like salted peanuts.

“I’m sure we will,” she says, and takes him by the hand.

**Author's Note:**

> So, an attempt to take all the weird, messy bits of comics!canon and make them work in the far better-written world of games!canon. This was difficult, as comics!canon is 60% stupid bullshit.
> 
> Anyways, major thanks to Norway, for her extremely patient editing. No thanks at all to Bill Willingham, who is a dick with bad, dick-ish ideas of romance.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[lambergeier](http://lambergeier.tumblr.com)


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